Your Guide to Choosing the Right Webinar Platform
Webinars are still one of the best ways for a coach, consultant or small firm to show what they know to a room of the right people. When I first wrote this in March 2024, I compared Zoom, Luma and Kajabi. One of my descriptions needed correcting and every price has moved, so here is the 2026 version. Prices were checked on each vendor's site on 6 October 2026 and are in US dollars.
Zoom: where the webinar actually happens
Zoom is where the live session itself happens. For a small workshop, a Zoom Workplace Pro licence ($14.16 per user a month, billed yearly) gives you meetings of up to 30 hours with 100 participants. The free Basic plan stops meetings at 40 minutes.
For a proper broadcast, where hosts present and attendees watch, Zoom Webinars costs $83.33 per user a month, billed yearly, for up to 500 attendees. It includes chat, reactions, polls and Q&A, and recordings split into chapters by AI.
Luma: the invitation and the guest list
In 2024 I wrote that Luma had polls and quizzes. That was wrong. Luma runs the event page, registrations, invitations and reminders, but it does not host the video. It connects to Zoom, can create the Zoom meeting or webinar for you, and tracks who attended. Polls and Q&A happen inside Zoom.
Its free plan covers unlimited events and guests, reminders by email, SMS and WhatsApp, and up to 500 invites a week, with a 5% fee on paid tickets. Luma Plus costs $59 a month billed yearly, drops that fee to 0% and raises invites to 5,000 a week.
Kajabi: the funnel around the webinar
Kajabi is a platform for running courses, communities and the marketing around them. Its plans are Basic at $143 a month billed yearly ($179 monthly), Growth at $199 and Pro at $399, both billed yearly. Kajabi's own help centre says Zoom is not a native integration: you run the webinar in Zoom and use Kajabi's emails and funnel templates to get people there. It also has built-in live video inside course products.
Kajabi makes sense when the webinar is the front door to a course or programme you already run on it.
Which one?
- Occasional workshops for under 100 people: Zoom Workplace Pro, with Luma's free plan for registration and reminders.
- Regular public webinars for bigger audiences: Zoom Webinars.
- Webinars that lead into a paid course or membership: Kajabi, with Zoom underneath.
The admin around the webinar
We used to manage webinars for clients as virtual assistants. We no longer offer VA work, because nearly every job a VA did around a webinar is now a set of steps a system can run on its own:
- new registrations copied into your CRM and tagged by event;
- reminders sent at set times before the start;
- the recording sent to everyone afterwards, with a different note for people who missed it;
- a follow-up task created for anyone who asked a question.
The part no platform does for you is filling the room. Posting about the event and hoping the right people see it is unreliable. A short, personal invitation to a list of people who fit your ideal client works better, especially to people already in your network. On every account where we have run both, warm outreach to existing connections drew two to five times the reply rate of cold outreach.
That invitation work is what we run for clients through done-for-you outreach, with every message written for the person and checked against your rules before it goes.
